Chapter One

Attending a show at the Blackbird Cabaret was always a fascinating experience.

The building itself contributed a lot to that. Capinera actively refused to add permanent furniture, so you either stood, or you brought a chair or blanket to sit on if there was room at the event in question. The ceiling was open to show ducting and rafters from when the building was a warehouse, and the floor was open concrete except for a single, simple stage. The overall impression was an odd, surreal minimalism. It lent the Blackbird a sort of raw feeling, unfiltered and without any pretense.

Then you had the audience, which was its own kind of bizarre. Capinera didn’t exactly bar normal humans from it (though some of the individual performers did), but the crowd was always mostly or entirely drawn from the supernatural community. That never made up a large portion of the total population, but Pittsburgh had enough people to still maintain a decent crowd of us, and the Blackbird had enough of a reputation by now to draw people from further afield as well. I’d seen a lot of very strange people there, many of whom were barely even pretending to be mortals.

And, finally, there was the performance itself. Capinera was easily the most gifted a capella vocalist I’d ever heard, and those nights were so intense in their sound and emotion that I could barely tolerate being in the room for them. But most nights, she wasn’t performing herself, just providing the space for someone else. Those performers could be very, very strange, and unfortunately their quality was…not often on par with hers.…

Prelude

If I have a wish   it is to find you   where I find poetry

Do you ever   close your eyes in full sunlight   Here close your eyes

You are everything   that has not yet been lost

-Joanna Klink, excerpted from “Aerial”, Raptus, 2010…

Enthrallment

Thralls are a complex concept in this setting, and one which varies widely in execution. The basic concept of enthrallment is that a person is subjected to intense enough mental magic that their actions are effectively under the control of someone else. There are a ton of ways to do this, and pretty much all of them are pretty fucked up. Enthrallment is not at all the same thing as subtle mental influence, or even the kinds of high-intensity emotional manipulation which Capinera is capable of. There are qualitative differences that are somewhat hard to define but extremely significant.

To start with, enthrallment is a sustained state. It is not a spell you cast on someone once and move on. Capinera makes you feel something while you’re hearing her sing, but when the song is over you get over it. That’s a big part of what produces the qualitative difference. When the CIA was doing extremely unethical large-scale experiments with LSD (yes, this is a thing that really happened, and Project MKUltra is fascinating to read about in a horrifying way), this would be the difference between the people they dosed once during an interrogation and the people who were on a bad acid trip for six months straight in a mental hospital. One of these things is going to do a hell of a lot more harm to someone than the other, even though both are using the same drug and the same basic methodology. A thrall is like the second one. The enchantments applied to them are not transient in nature, and that matters a lot.

There are a lot of ways someone can go about this kind of magic. By and large, they’re going to be sorted into categories in two distinct ways, depending on which part of the experience is being discussed.…

Melissa

I wake up early. I didn’t especially mean to, just woke up an hour before my alarm. I hate it when that happens. I have a hard time getting to sleep, so trying to get any more sleep will take long enough that I might as well just get up now. So I do, stretching. Shoulder feels stiff. That’s annoying. It’s been three days since I helped Shawn carry furniture around. I don’t like that my arm is still complaining about it.

I dress myself with barely-conscious movements. It’s a familiar routine, and I wake up sluggish, so it runs on autopilot. It’s just a t-shirt and jeans anyway. Hoodie today, because it’s cold out. Normal.

Check my bag, it’s fine. I don’t really have much else to do before school. I sit and try to play video games to distract myself, but I’m already too distracted for it to help. Can’t focus through the intrusive thoughts. I don’t know what it’s about, not really. I don’t know why I’m having intrusive thoughts about poison, about fire. It’s not something I remember thinking much about until recently.

There are a lot of things I don’t remember happening until recently.…

Unreliable Narrators

Every source of information you get about this story is unreliable. This includes the things I say, to a degree; I don’t lie about the contents of the story, but there are plenty of things I omit, particularly spoilers about future story events or the hidden significance of some of the elements in the story and characters. I’m not likely to point things like that out in the comments, because the story is written from Kyoko’s perspective and I tend to limit some kinds of information to things she knows.

So, I’m unreliable. The information within the story is even more so. Every character has their own biases and agendas. Everyone has blind spots. Many people are either actively misinformed, reaching wrong conclusions, or simply lying. Kyoko’s narration is not an exception, and that the story is purely conveyed in that narration impacts what shows up in numerous ways. One of the major things I hope to do with things like interludes, in-universe documents, and extended notes is provide other perspectives, other elements of the story, characters, and world.…

Interludes

Interlude chapters are shorter pieces that I place between books. Some actually take place during the books, but I set them aside because I feel that interrupting the flow of the narration is more disruptive than it’s worth, particularly when the intention is that the story is fully intelligible without them. There are two basic types: Interludes, which are narrative stories, and documents, which are in-universe documents of various kinds. Both are optional, but they provide potentially valuable context for the books.

The reason for interludes is pretty straightforward. This story is written entirely in first-person limited perspective. That is to say, all of the narration is from Kyoko’s perspective, written in first person, and written with no additional knowledge beyond what she knows in the moment being described. One of the greatest strengths of this style, and the reason I prefer it, is that it allows the voice of that character to show through very strongly. Everything is seen from her perspective, which also showcases how her perspective works—what she prioritizes and pays attention to, what she ignores, the cognitive links she’s making. But this is also probably the single biggest weakness of this perspective, because Kyoko’s perception is not complete. There are events she’s not present for, and even when she is present, she isn’t going to see everything. There are details she doesn’t notice or doesn’t pay attention to, contextual meaning she isn’t aware of, assessment and interpretation she might get wrong, bias she introduces. This makes it feel real, but it does mean the reader isn’t seeing everything. Hence, there are side chapters which are meant to provide context and other perspectives.…